Indian Holocaust My Father`s Life and Time: Uttar Pradesh scraps 26 projects benefiting mainly Dalits

LUCKNOW: The UP government on Friday decided to scrap Mayawati's pet projects aimed mainly at Dalits, or named after Dalit icons and use the money freed up for new projects that the SP government will prioritise, most of them poll promises like unemployment dole and laptops and tablets for students. The attempt is to make the welfare schemes targeted at a more wider audience, not just Dalits.

This will affect 26 schemes being handled by 13 departments involving Rs 4,861.72 crore. Most of the money was flowing into conservation and protection of parks and memorials built in the memory of Dalit icons, scholarship to Dalit students, and also those schemes launched in the name of BSP founder Kanshiram. However, the government has clarified that work which had already started, for instance houses under construction as part of the Kanshiram Awas Yojana, will not be stopped, but the scheme or project will not be renewed after that.

Another major decision the cabinet took was to stop reservation of government contracts for SC/ST bidders that Maya introduced in June 2009. The government said this was affecting the quality of work and a more competitive bidding process would benefit the state.

This was the third meeting of the cabinet after Akhilesh Yadav took over as chief minister two months back. In all, the government plans to take up 36 projects, some of them new like construction of roads, while the others are old schemes tweaked to suit the present regime.

Part of the money released from the Dalit schemes will go to fund the unemployment allowance that SP had promised in its manifesto. This will cost the state Rs 1,113 crore and will benefit 9 lakh unemployed youth. To be eligible for this, a candidate should be live in UP, register with the unemployment exchange by March 15 of any financial year and the total income of the family should not exceed Rs 1.50 lakh a year. Only those between 30 and 40 will be eligible and they will get Rs 1,000 per month.

The money will also fund Akhilesh's other poll promise to distribute tablets to students who clear Class X and laptops to those who clear Class XII. It will also fund pension to farmers above 65 years of age, again a poll promise. Around seven lakh small and marginal farmers will be covered under the scheme.

In some cases, however, projects will merely be renamed and their scope broadened. For instance, the Savitri Bhai Phule Scheme For Girls' Education which benefited only Dalitswill now be called Kanya Vidya Dhan, which will fund the education of all poor girls who clear school.

Other projects, too, have been made more inclusive. For instance, the Kanshiram Housing Scheme for Urban Poor and Mahamaya Housing Scheme for Rural Poor will now be clubbed under the common banner of Housing For The Homeless and will cover not only poor Dalits but also the poor among other castes.

In another decision, the government decided to do away with the existing Ambedkar Gram Vikas Yojana and replace it with Rammanohar Lohiya Samagra Gram Vikas Yojana to cover a total 10,000 villages in the five years. In the first phase, 1,600 villages would be taken up in 2012-13.

Some of the projects that will be scrapped are: Manyavar Sri Kansiramji Shahari Garib Awas Yojana, Manyavar Sri Kanshiramji ji Green Eco Garden, construction, beautification and conservation of Lucknow Parivartan Chowk and Baba Saheb Ambedkar Prateek Sthal, Mahamaya Garib Balika Ashirvad Yojana, Manyavar Sri Kanshiramji Sahari Dalit Bahulya Basti Samagra Vikas Yojana.

Other schemes are Mahamaya Awas Yojana, Mahamaya Sarvajan Awas Yojana, Savirti Bai Phule Balika Shiksha Madad Yojana, job creation for minorities, CC road construction in Dr. Ambedkar villages by the Panchayati Raj.

Other decisions taken by the cabinet include formulation of rules and regulation for brick kiln, increasing the remuneration from Rs 12,000 to Rs 18,000 for Ayurvedic and Unani doctors taken on contract in government hospitals and increasing honoraria of Aganwadi workers.

The Tribune

Preneet writes to Plan panel on SC sub-plan

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2012/20120513/punjab.htm#13

Tribune News Service

Patiala, May 12

The Union Minister of State for External Affairs, Preneet Kaur, has asked the Planning Commission to take steps to expedite action for implementation of the Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) on the pattern of Maharashtra model in Punjab. In a communication addressed to Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the Minister has sent a copy of the memorandum that she received from the Chamar Mahan Sabha, through its president Paramjit Singh Kainth.

Preneet stated that Kainth had insisted that since the SCSP Maharashtra model was the brainchild of the Planning Commission of India, it was now the responsibility of the Commission to have it implemented in Punjab as well. "Article 46 of the Constitution of India directs the state governments to promote with special care the education and economic interests of the weaker sections, Scheduled Castes in particular, protecting them from social injustice and other forms of exploitation", reads the memorandum submitted to Preneet by the Sabha.

The Hindu

Protest against burning of flex banner of Ambedkar

http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/karnataka/article3408999.ece

Staff Correspondent

The police burst tear-gas shells, resorted to lathi-charge and fired rubber bullets to disperse an unruly mob that blocked the Bangalore-Mysore highway at the Fountain Circle (Ambedkar Circle) here on Friday, to protest against the burning of a flex banner of Ambedkar.

The protesters, who wanted to stage a dharna at the circle, started pelting stones on the policemen, injuring more than a dozen of them.

The injured policemen were treated at a hospital.

Six persons from Gandhinagar area were arrested for the stone-throwing.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) Basavaraj Malagatti told The Hindu that those who burnt the flex banner were yet to be traced. Prohibitory orders had been imposed in the area till Saturday, he said.

Traffic came to a standstill early in the morning and normality was restored only by afternoon

Mayor M.C. Rajeshwari, who visited the spot, promised that the culprits would be brought to book soon. Additional reinforcements had been deployed and the vigil would continue in the area, Mr. Malagatti added.

NDTV

Human rights commission hold open hearing in Ahmedabad

on atrocities against Scheduled Castes

http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/human-rights-commission-hold-open-hearing-in-ahmedabad-on-atrocities-against-scheduled-castes-209848

Press Trust of India |

Updated: May 12, 2012 12:30 IST

New Delhi: The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) will hold a two-day 'open hearing' in Ahmedabad from next Monday on issues relating to alleged atrocities against Scheduled Castes in Gujarat and the problems faced by them in seeking justice.

The delegation will be led by NHRC Chairperson Justice K G Balakrishnan. NHRC Member Justice B C Patel, A K Garg, Registrar (Law) and senior officers of the Commission will be part of the delegation.

The Commission after hearing the affected people will also meet the representatives of NGOs and later on hold discussions with the Chief Secretary, DGP and senior civil, police and jail officials on these issues along with other major outstanding cases pertaining to the State of Gujarat.

The Commission has decided to hold such open hearings to reach out to the Dalits and hear their complaints about violations of their rights by the public authorities as part of the recommendations given by K B Saxena IAS (retired) in his report to NHRC on the continuing problems faced by the Scheduled Castes.

The Commission had organized an 'open hearing' at Puri in Odisha in April this year during which more than 200 complaints were received.

The Asian Age

Food fascism

http://www.asianage.com/columnists/food-fascism-369

May 13, 2012

Kancha Ilaiah

After the beef festival in Osmania University, Hyderabad, on April 15 — in which 1,500-2,000 students belonging to SC/ST/OBC communities and some faculty members participated — was attacked by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) activists, food culture has become an issue of national debate.

The ABVP and RSS attacked the students who ate beef, burnt media vans covering the festival and a bus on the Osmania campus. Predictably, they used only SC/ST/OBC students to get the job done. Osmania students, leaving behind their image as agitators for a separate Telangana state, became the harbingers of social reform that could protect the Muslims, who often face hostility sparked by the notion that it is ungodly to eat beef, even in this region.
Culture engenders passion and throughout history cultural battles have claimed more lives than wars fought over land. After human society entered the phase of organised religion, each religion formulated its own notion of God and structuralised its relationship with God/ gods/prophets. In this process, many inimical relationships were established between religions, based often on the food habits of people and the theological definitions that had been worked out around them.

What is not so well known is that the Arya dharma was constructed around full-scale beef-eating in ancient India and the early opposition to that came from Jain Vardhaman Mahavir and the spiritual theory that required total abstinence from all forms of meat. Since it was not possible to sustain large human existence around only vegetarianism (at that time all plants were treated as lifeless), Jainism could not expand. The beef-eating Arya dharma continued to hold sway, perhaps till such time as Gautam Buddha's Buddhism gained in strength.

Buddha discovered the middle path between the Vedic multi-fold, violent spiritual dharma and the extreme non-violent Jain philosophy, and abolished all forms of animal sacrifices (within the Sangha), but allowed eating of meat, beef, pork and fish as purely need-based food items.
We do not have exact evidence when the Arya Brahmins became vegetarians. One theory is that they adopted the pure vegetarian food culture during Adi Shankara's anti-Buddhist Advaita campaigns. Though there are Brahmins who ritually eat meat and fish in several parts of western and eastern India, beef, somehow, has become a spiritual untouchable, maybe because of cow worship of Brahminism.

Beef may have gone out of Hindu food culture, but it has survived among SC/STs and some OBC communities.

In evolving vegetarianism, the influence of Jainism worked more than any other factor. During the phase of Islam's expansion and British colonialism, Brahmins not only became rigid vegetarians but established a cow-worshipping culture and came to label Muslims and Christians as "cow eaters".

They also re-worked their literary texts to say that vegetarians are sacred (pure) people and meat, beef and fish-eaters are chandaals. During this entire period they never cared to examine what the Sudras, Ati Sudras (Dalits) and Adivasis, who had nothing to do with Islam and Christianity, were eating. The preferred food of the vast masses continued to be meat, fish and beef.

During the freedom struggle, Brahminic vegetarianism got a further fillip with Mahatma Gandhi joining the bandwagon.

Gandhi, in fact, politicised food culture in a significant way. The RSS and its political wing, Jana Sangh, also adopted vegetarianism and cow protection (not buffalo and bull protection) as their post-Independence, nationalist, cultural ideology, without any regard for the democratic principle that what one eats must be left to the individual.

Till the days of the Mandal movement, the Bharatiya Janata Party (the new name of the Jana Sangh), remained weak because the Dalit-Bahujan masses suspected that its leaders wouldn't eat "people's food". It remained by and large a Brahmin-Baniya party. Till then, in fact, all parties were headed by Brahminic forces who took for granted that Gandhian Hinduism had acquired legitimacy. The communists never engaged with cultural issues, thinking that the masses would not like such an engagement. But they did not talk against any food culture.

After Independence, even academic institutions turned Brahminic vegetarian; several sociologists wrote what could be called "Hindu sociology", dividing society into pure (vegetarian) and impure (meat, fish and beef-eating) castes.

Modern sociological theories, instead of suggesting methods of abolishing graded caste-based inequalities, added the new spiritual fascist language of "social purity" of vegetarianism and "social impurity" of non-vegetarianism. They, too, forgot that Indian Muslims and Christians would be bracketed as impure people. But the Indian Christians and Muslims know that their God created animals to provide food for humans. The Bible, for example, says, "You may eat any animal that has completely split hooves and that chews the cud." It further says that the camel, though it chews the cud, does not have a split hoof; the pig, though, has a split hoof but does not chew the cud; therefore "you must not eat their meat."

The Quran's prescriptions are on the same lines. But the Western Christian menu includes pork and the Muslim menu includes camel meat. It was the non-cow and -pig-eating food culture that caused the Sepoy mutiny in India in 1857.

To overcome all these problems of food culture that India as a modern nation has inherited, we should adopt a democratic plural and individualist food culture without validating anything in spiritual terms. Universities ought to be agents of transformation.

SC/ST/OBC students come from uninhibited food cultural backgrounds and they think that the mess menu should be multi-cultural and not affect the individual's democratic right to eat any item. No religious culture (Hindu, Muslim, Christian) should control the food habits of people. In this respect, states must follow the Kerala model of keeping an all-inclusive menu in public spaces, and not the Gujarat model, where one religious culture rules the roost.

Kancha Ilaiah is director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad

--
.Arun Khote
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of "Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC")
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Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.